Has Singleness of Purpose Become Narrowness of Purpose? Grapevine Article May 2004 By David F.

I know the argument. Alcoholics Anonymous is for alcoholics. It’s about alcohol, it’s not about drugs. Check the pamphlets. Check the Big Book. They talk about alcohol, not drugs. People with drug problems should go to other twelve-step programs. AA is for alcoholics.

I know the argument because I argued it once myself. This was back in the late seventies. I was doing my first ninety and ninety–ninety meetings in ninety days–and I was doing it my way: no alcohol, but lots of hash brownies to keep me going between meetings. And this audacious AA group on the Upper West Side of New York, Chelsea Riverside, was trying to ban drugs as well as alcohol. They were holding a business meeting to decide whether you had to be both clean and dry to celebrate your anniversary there, and I was arguing against it like my life depended on it.

“AA is about alcohol,” I screamed. “Your drug-bashing violates the AA Traditions and the Constitution of the United States!”

Fortunately for Chelsea Riverside, and ultimately for me, I lost the argument. Chelsea Riverside continued to help people stay sober, and I continued to drink and experiment with AA for the next four years, slipping and sliding, going to meetings stoned but not drunk. See, I knew I had an alcohol problem because alcohol made me fall down stairs. But I didn’t have a drug problem because drugs didn’t make me fall down stairs. That was my standard–falling down stairs.

Finally in August, 1981, out of work and out of hope, home alone sipping vodka and watching cable TV news in my pajamas, I got a call from one of my few remaining friends. “Go back to AA,” she suggested, “and this time give up drugs as well as alcohol.”

I was furious. “But I don’t have a drug problem,” I wailed. “Maybe not,” she said, “but when the drugs run out, you go back to alcohol.” She didn’t mention anything about stairs.

A few days later, thanks to the grace of my Higher Power, I woke up with a new head. I decided to return to AA, but this time I would do everything I was told–get a sponsor, get a home group, work the Steps. But mainly, abstain from alcohol and drugs, one day at a time.

And with my surrender came the realization that I had a disease. I was an alcoholic, strangely and dangerously attracted to all mood-altering substances. Sure, there were differences. Frankly, as a child of the sixties, I thought drugs were more glamorous than alcohol, the bourgeois mood-alterer of my parents. But I always returned to booze. “Drugs were like my lovers,” I said in my qualification, “but alcohol was like my wife.”

Thank God we were allowed to talk about drugs at those early meetings. Thank God I was able to hear the experience, strength, and hope of fellow alcoholics who also had a drug story. Thank God I was allowed to say, “I’m David. I’m a drug addict and alcoholic.” This, of course, was before singleness of purpose became a big deal.

Back then, I never heard the phrase “singleness of purpose.” (If I had, I might have won my argument at Chelsea Riverside.) Oh sure, I’d heard of “primary purpose.” I knew that “our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.” It was in the Preamble, along with “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” And I’d read the essays in “The Twelve and Twelve” on the Third and Fifth Traditions, basically elaborations on those two points.

All those fine words, most of them written by Bill W. himself, were inclusive, filled with love, tolerance, and a desire to help all who suffer. They made me feel I was in the right place. But singleness of purpose, as it’s practiced by many today, has come to mean something quite different. As one former AA trustee told me recently: “It’s a political buzzword for ‘We don’t like people who take drugs.

Singleness of purpose has become the rallying cry for those who want to ban all talk of drugs at AA meetings, limit how you identify yourself, limit how you name your meeting, restrict all books read and sold at meetings to Conference-approved literature, and in general treat drugs and dual addiction as irrelevant “outside issues.” It has created deep divisions within the Fellowship and caused AA groups in many parts of the country to become more doctrinaire, less friendly, less attractive, and less helpful.

So naturally I was a bit bewildered to learn that this year’s AA General Service Conference was being dedicated to “Singleness of Purpose–the Cornerstone of AA.” Had I missed something? How did a movement so relatively new and so divisive become the cornerstone of AA? I decided to ask around, talk to some old-timers and some people who work in the General Service Office of Alcoholics Anonymous (GSO). And while I’m sure the whole picture is more complex and nuanced, here are a few things I found out.

It started with the blue card. Well actually, it probably started a few years earlier. In the late seventies and early eighties, drug treatment centers around the country began referring drug addicts–dually-addicted alcoholics and so-called “nonalcoholic addicts”–to AA meetings. A lot of AA members got freaked out. “Parts of the country were being inundated, flooded, by people coming out of treatment who didn’t have any idea of our primary purpose or anything else,” said the former trustee, who has been in the program since the sixties. “They were just talking all over the place. And there were groups unquestionably coming apart at the seams.”

Many groups responded by passing all kinds of rules and restrictions. Bob P., a retiring GSO senior advisor and former general manager, addressed the problem in a closing talk at the 1986 General Service Conference. Basically, he said the threat to AA was not from the outside, not from “treatment centers or professionals in the field. . .or young people or the dually-addicted or even the druggies trying to come to our closed meetings.” He said the threat was from within.

“If you were to ask me what is the greatest danger facing Alcoholics Anonymous today, I would have to answer: the growing rigidity that is so apparent to me and many others. The increasing demand for absolute answers to nit-picking questions. Pressure for GSO to ‘enforce’ our Traditions. Screening alcoholics at closed meetings. Prohibiting non-Conference-approved literature, i.e., ‘banning books.’ Laying more and more rules on groups and members.”

Apparently Bob P.’s warning fell on many deaf ears that night, because next year’s Conference, in 1987, erupted in controversy.

“We debated for a good six hours,” recalled a former GSO staff worker who was there. “It was heated and lengthy, and repetitious. One group wanted a Conference-approved pamphlet that talked about what you could and couldn’t say. Another group said we have the Traditions, we have the Preamble–why do we need anything more? And a third group wanted a ‘service piece’ that could be read voluntarily at meetings.”

The result was the blue card, a pale blue index card that GSO still makes available to groups who wish to use it. On one side, it explains what an open meeting is; on the other side, a closed meeting; on both sides there’s a reference to “singleness of purpose,” plus these words, “We ask that all who participate confine their discussion to their problems with alcohol.”

The blue card was seen as a compromise–a group didn’t have to read it if it didn’t want to–but it marked the first time in recent memory, if ever, that the General Service Conference had attempted to control what was said at local meetings. And it had a chilling effect that, to one degree or another, is still being felt today.

Recently a member of the Grapevine staff who’s been sober many years was qualifying at a meeting, giving his drunkalog. And when he mentioned he’d only tried drugs a few times and immediately went back to drinking, a member of the singleness of purpose police stood up and cut him off in mid-sentence. “Don’t talk about drugs,” she snapped. “This is an AA meeting.” Later I mentioned this woman’s rude behavior to an old-timer friend of mine, a man with forty-four years’ sobriety, and he replied, “She did the right thing. He had no business talking about drugs.”

Two months ago, I witnessed a business meeting of a popular Upper West Side group where they voted to ban the Grapevine–the AA Grapevine–from their inspirational reading because they thought it wasn’t Conference-approved literature. They were mistaken–the Grapevine is Conference-recognized as “the international journal of Alcoholics Anonymous.” But they banned it anyway “in keeping with our singleness of purpose.” I told the former AA trustee about this bizarre vote and philosophized that I guess all us alcoholics have a little control-freak inside us. “That may be,” he said, “but why do so many of us want to be controlled?”

Today, at most of the AA meetings I go to here in Manhattan and in upstate New York, they do not read the blue card, and no one tries to censor the speaker. They don’t have to–by now most speakers censor themselves. At meeting after meeting, I hear speakers say things like, “I won’t go into my drug use because this is an AA meeting.” Or, “I know this is an AA meeting, but drugs are part of my story. Please forgive me.” To me, the shame and self-editing, apologizing for one addiction and not another, apologizing for telling the truth, may be the sickest legacy of singleness of purpose. What a great message to send to the dually-addicted newcomer!

I know there are many, many compassionate AA members who honestly believe singleness of purpose is the best axiom to keep AA focused on the job it does best–helping the still-suffering alcoholic. I know a lot may have personally witnessed and been offended by some self-centered drug addict spewing his tale at a meeting without once mentioning alcohol. They may have been put off by treatment phrases like “chemical dependence” and “substance abuse,” which seem to imply that drug addiction and alcoholism are the same disease, a frightening concept to some.

Clearly, the issue of what to do about drugs, as well as the huge influx of dually-addicted alcoholics into the rooms, has been the biggest challenge for AA in the last twenty-five years. And I think many members were hoping that singleness of purpose, in particular the blue card, would make the problem go away. At this it has sadly failed.

As a GSO staffer wrote to an AA member in 1991, “In the years that I have been here on the staff, I think we have probably received more letters regarding the issues of drug addicts in AA and dually-addicted members talking about drugs than any other single subject. That, of course, includes how members identify themselves. I often wish our co-founder could return to share his thoughts on the subject in the nineties.”

Yes, don’t we all? But I did find these words in the Grapevine from B.B., an alcoholic in Long Beach, California. I think Bill W. might identify with them:

“I love Alcoholics Anonymous. I love being sober. For me, the only criterion for belonging in a closed meeting of AA is whether a person wants to be there or not. I don’t think it threatens my sobriety or the future of AA if I simply try to welcome whoever comes, love him, help him, and invite him to keep coming back.”

In the end, I think we must try to get beyond the words and the labels, the rules and the fears. AA works on a higher level. What is membership? There’s no certificate. Can you really tell the difference between a closed meeting and an open one? Not in Manhattan. It’s the honor system. And what does it mean when a Conference chooses a theme? They do it every year; it’s not one of the Ten Commandments.

And what about those tens of thousands of dually-addicted alcoholics who now fill the rooms of AA? Are they a problem or an opportunity? When you think about all the shared wisdom in all the AA meetings around the world for nearly seventy years–that’s like a great data bank of priceless knowledge about alcoholism. And now that data bank includes wisdom about dual addiction, wisdom that can be used to help new cross-addicted alcoholics as they come in the door. In fact, despite singleness of purpose, or maybe because of it, that’s been going on for years.

I remember some time back going to one of those huge West Hollywood AA meetings where it’s so crowded you have to get there an hour early just to put your keys on the floor to reserve a spot to stand. As in many meetings that size, there was a woman translating in American Sign Language for hearing-impaired members. And I’ll never forget the sign she used when a person identified himself as an addict/alcoholic. In one swift, seamless motion, she hit her arm with her fist, as if she was plunging a needle into it, then drew the fist to her mouth as if she was drinking from it. She did it effortlessly, as if she’d done it a thousand times.

That was simple, beautiful, and terrifying. That sign told the whole story. The story of that alcoholic. The story of many, many alcoholics in AA today. The story of a growing, healing, tolerant, and ever-changing Fellowship. It was a sign of the times.